MAL Ep. 26
This session the party explored the house in the marshlands. 1) First, the group reconnoitered the house for some time, sneaking up on it carefully, positioning the party members around it strategically, and knocking at the door attired in the green robes of Corrigar. However, nobody answered. The lock on the front door seemed to have a necromantic trap on it and the windows were really spooky, so the party decided to have Red use wood shape to open a hole into the house instead, which they passed through without incident. After the fact, the party remembered that they had actually found a key in Ander's hidden safe last session which they could have used to open the front door. Oops. 2) Inside, the group found the source of the red glow: a magical brazier which gave Red and Zadkiel a vision about being lowered into the sea to the eerie sound of a heartbeat. Tisha used a dispel magic to disable a magic mirror, warning the party they could be used for scrying. Red found a bed upstairs with a scent she recognized from the Cult of Corrigar in Ruastin, though she could not positively identify it as Ander's (there was a crowd of cultists moving around at the time she smelled them.) Zadkiel found a blacklight flashlight. Aler and Bay found buttons inside four fish plaques on the walls, turning them into fish skeletons and causing a staircase leading down to open. 3) Passing through an underground corridor, the party discovered trapped octopus plaques, but Tisha fluffed her disable device roll and was blinded by some strange ink for the remainder of the adventure. 4) The party arrived in a study with a shiny floor, with a crooked painting on the wall bearing the words "The cure for anything is saltwater... tears, sweat or the sea." The door on the other side would not open, giving a minor electrical shock to anyone who touched it. Searching the desk, Aler found a purse, a scroll of Speak With Dead, a parchment in the illithid language, and a letter from Petros warning Ander to exercise caution with some apparently "forbidden" knowledge he had come across. Using Tongues on Zadkiel, the party learned that the parchment is ritual language (analagous to a magical text one would have to use "read magic" on), and that the inscription over the door reads "Abandon Hope," though reading the latter was deeply unsettling to Zadkiel. Using the blacklight revealed three magical runes on the floor: symbols of water, earth, and Corrigar. Rotating the crooked painting caused the whole room to tilt, not just the painting, causing most the PCs to slide down the smooth floor into a darkened room below. 5) The room below seemed to have had people in it relatively recently (a toilet chute in the corner was used a week or two ago by Red's estimation.) The word "Mariska" was written on the wall in dried blood, but there was no smell of death in the room. Aler and Bay, who had avoided falling into the lower room, manipulated the painting to open the room again and release the other PCs, commenting that this room didn't make sense as a trap with which to attack intruders. The party guessed that perhaps it might be a prison.They activated the three magical runes, then Red used the strange crystal on the desk to turn the doorknob and open the door. 6) The party passed into a shrine with a mosaic floor. They recognized the stone altar here as similar to the one they had seen in the shrine of Corrigar in the sewers. On top of the altar was a chalice of wine and within it was a pitcher of unholy water and a basket of rags. Upon further examination, the rags appeared to be a linen tunic and pants that had been cut with a knife, but there was no blood on them. The scent matched one of the scents Red had smelled in the prison room. Meanwhile Zadkiel and Khirg found a wand on top of a bookshelf, then Zadkiel became entranced by an ominous looking illithid book titled "Mysteries of the Snake" and sat down on the floor to begin reading it. In the desk, Aler found a thin black journal, a green potion, and a letter in the illithid language. The letter seemed to be discussing Harasket's curses, including an explanation of a memory curse that may match Jon's. The journal was a magical research notebook, which started innocently enough describing an Aquan artifact, but the last four pages were nothing but the single illithid word "power" repeated over and over again. The book Zadkiel was reading was starting to cause disturbing Illithid murmurs to play in his head, but he couldn't stop reading it. The other PCs disrupted his reading, allowing him to quickly shut it. Khirg took that book and another one titled "As The Worm Turns" and put them in his backpack. At this point the party was starting to suffer the effects of acid that had burned through their boots and Zadkiel's pants. They retreated from the room, and Aler, using true seeing, found the mosaic floor to be illusory and the real floor to have pools of acid in several places. The party proceeded more cautiously through the room and through the door on the other side, which Bay noticed a disarmed magical lock on it. 7) The party went down a staircase into a dark cave with an octopus carving engraved in the floor and a bar with two manacle-like clasps hanging from the ceiling over an underground grotto of sea water. Red turned into a plesiosaur and slipped into the water to investigate, triggering a flash image of a man with his arms extended hovering above the water. Khirg found some perfectly cleaned human skulls in a cauldron, Adriel found a lever which she wanted to pull but the other PCs dissuaded her from pulling it, Zadkiel examined a large balance with a crystal feather on one side and placed his own angel feather on the other side, causing the sound of a man's scream to reverberate in the room, and Aler opened a heavy metal chest and found a fist-sized crystal skull with large eyes, a vaguely alien shape, and no mouth. 8) Shortly after Aler picked up the crystal skull, the heartbeat sound was heard again and a gigantic water abomination burst out of the water, seizing Aler and mauling Red. After a brief, strobe-lit battle, the monster turned and left, carrying Zadkiel away with it in angel form, but he used Free Action to wriggle free and swim to safety. 9) The basement of the house was collapsing and flooding with ocean water, from which tentacles were starting to emerge and thrash at the party. Rather than run the gauntlet of tentacles, the party decided to exit through the grotto, riding on a Megaladon Red summoned to the safety of shore. And there we left them for the session, battered and nearly out of spells but intact. After the party sleeps, Tisha's blindness and Zadkiel's Will -DRM will wear off. Onward!